It feels so long to me since I last wrote and it was only a few days. In that time I started a new job, off the farm, and our computer also quit working. Without the ritual of daily writing and making pictures, my concept of time passing steadily as if I were walking, was no longer true. The past week felt like one big lump. I learned how to work the computer, cash register, and credit card machine of my new job and I missed reading your words.

This morning during breakfast Harriet asked me for the name of Theseus’ wife and I went up to my bookshelf to get my eighth grade book from Mr. Shoemaker’s English class, Mythology and You. (This is unrelated but I want to tell it anyway… Yesterday, she asked what albaricoque meant and on the title page of my old Spanish-English dictionary I found that there is still a drawing of a purple heart with”Trinidad y Ana son amigas” written inside. That could have been written yesterday. Time is meaningless.) After she left for school I sat with my coffee and opened up the mythology book to the middle and read:

Creativity is one way people free themselves from the limitations of conditioned responses. It is a means by which people free themselves also, of ordinary choices. It enlarges the universe by discovering new dimensions. It also enriches people by enabling them to experience these dimensions inwardly….There are some conditions or attitudes under which creative endeavor thrives. One of them is, surprisingly, aloneness, or being able to be alone without being lonely. Other circumstances that seem to promote the creative process are inactivity and daydreaming…In order to be creative, we must put what we have discovered into action.

. . . . .

Through the holidays, I’m working in the mall selling beautiful wooden German toys. It has started off slowly although today was a little better. Without windows to the outside world I check my watch in the afternoon because it feels as it it could be the middle of the night. Meanwhile, I watch the people. (Heads up, either lots of babies are about to be born or malls are magnets to pregnant women. And before you get too excited for me, pregnant women and parents with babies don’t even glance at our toys.) The hard part of my job is that there are pop versions of Christmas music playing all day. The fun part is I get to spend the day selling dolls, board games, and rainbow-colored blocks. (Elisa thinks I’m the luckiest person on the planet.) It is satisfying my curiosity. I always wondered a little about how other people spend their lives.